Karim Vaes

When you need to determine which process is monopolizing or eating the CPUs. Following command will displays the top 10 CPU users on the Linux system.

ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -k 1 -r | head -10

or

ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -r -k1 | less

Output
%CPU PID USER COMMAND
96 2148 vivek /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx -C /var/lib/vmware/Virtual Machines/Ubuntu 64-bit/Ubuntu 64-bit.vmx -@ ""
0.7 3358 mysql /usr/libexec/mysqld --defaults-file=/etc/my.cnf --basedir=/usr --datadir=/var/lib/mysql --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid --skip-locking --socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
0.4 29129 lighttpd /usr/bin/php
0.4 29128 lighttpd /usr/bin/php
0.4 29127 lighttpd /usr/bin/php
0.4 29126 lighttpd /usr/bin/php
0.2 2177 vivek [vmware-rtc]
0.0 9 root [kacpid]
0.0 8 root [khelper]

If you’re interested in more information on Linux CPU utilization then check out the related article on nixCraft here.